Car insurance claims in New Jersey

New Jersey pays injury claims through a no-fault scheme and then lets the driver decide how much of the courthouse to keep. The statute’s own recital calls it “New Jersey’s automobile insurance no-fault law” (N.J.S.A. 39:6A-1.1), and every standard policy must carry personal injury protection for the named insured and household family, paid without regard to negligence, liability or fault of any kind, up to $250,000 per person per accident (§ 39:6A-4). That ceiling is the statutory maximum, not what most drivers buy. The option ladder is in § 39:6A-4.3 — $250,000, $150,000, $75,000, $50,000 or $15,000 per person per accident — and it contains the single most useful sentence in New Jersey’s scheme for someone who has never thought about it: “If none of the aforesaid medical expense benefits options is affirmatively chosen in writing, the policy shall provide $250,000 medical expense benefits coverage.” A driver who never filled in a coverage selection form has the full ceiling. Whichever limit was chosen, up to $250,000 is preserved for permanent or significant brain injury, spinal cord injury or disfigurement, and for trauma-centre treatment immediately after the crash. So the first thing to establish after a New Jersey crash is not who was at fault — it is which PIP limit the policy carries, because that number, and not the other driver’s insurer, is what pays the first hospital bill. The election also binds resident relatives who are not named insureds under another policy.

The choice that matters most is the one made on the coverage selection form, long before the accident. Section 39:6A-8 opens by saying that one of two tort options shall be elected by the named insured. Under the limitation on lawsuit option, subsection (a), everyone covered is exempted from liability for non-economic loss unless the injured person sustained death, dismemberment, significant disfigurement or significant scarring, displaced fractures, loss of a fetus, or a permanent injury within a reasonable degree of medical probability other than scarring or disfigurement — with the statute defining permanent as a body part or organ that has not healed to function normally and will not heal to function normally with further medical treatment. Under the no limitation on lawsuit option, subsection (b), that exemption simply does not apply. If the limited option applies, § 39:6A-8(a) also imposes a deadline inside the lawsuit — a physician’s certification, under penalty of perjury and resting on objective clinical evidence, served on the defendant within sixty days of the answer, with one extension of up to sixty days available for good cause.

Shared fault is decided by a statute whose exact words matter more than its usual label. Contributory negligence does not bar recovery “if such negligence was not greater than the negligence of the person against whom recovery is sought or was not greater than the combined negligence of the persons against whom recovery is sought”, and any damages are then “diminished by the percentage sustained of negligence attributable to the person recovering” (N.J.S.A. 2A:15-5.1). “Not greater than” means a claimant at exactly fifty per cent still recovers, and the bar falls at fifty-one — so any account saying a New Jersey claimant is barred “at 50 %” is wrong. The companion section supplies no bar of its own: § 2A:15-5.2 is the fact-finding machinery, requiring the trier of fact to find the full value of the damages first, then each party’s percentage on a base of 100, after which “the judge shall mold the judgment”. Cite 5.1 for the bar and 5.2 for the arithmetic, never the reverse.

The minimum policy is not one figure either, and it has just moved. Under N.J.S.A. 39:6B-1 and § 39:6A-3, both rewritten by P.L.2022, c.87, liability cover must be at least $15,000 per person for plans issued or renewed before 1 January 2023, $25,000 from then until 1 January 2026, and $35,000 on or after that date; the per-accident figure runs $30,000, then $50,000, then $70,000; and property damage is $25,000 for any plan issued or renewed since 1 January 2023. The figures in force are therefore 35/70/25, and the Department’s 2026 Buyer’s Guide states them as the standard-policy floor. The staging is by policy issue or renewal date, not by the act’s commencement, which took effect on approval on 5 August 2022, so a policy written in late 2025 carries the older limits until it renews. Two statutory alternatives sit underneath: the Basic Policy of § 39:6A-3.1, whose medical cover is $15,000 with a $250,000 carve-out for brain, spinal cord, disfigurement and trauma-centre treatment and whose liability cover is optional at $10,000 for all persons and $5,000 property damage; and the Special Automobile Insurance Policy of § 39:6A-3.3, open to drivers enrolled in federal Medicaid with hospitalization, which buys emergency care up to $250,000 and a $10,000 death benefit and, in the statute’s words, “shall not provide liability, collision, comprehensive, uninsured or underinsured motorist coverage”. Uninsured and underinsured motorist cover is mandatory in every policy except a Basic Policy, at the same limits as the liability floor (§ 17:28-1.1(a)), with an optional top-up to $250,000 per person and $500,000 per accident that may not exceed the policy’s own liability limits — and a $500 exclusion on uninsured-motorist property damage that is easy to miss and is the reason a small dent from an uninsured driver is often not worth claiming.

The clocks divide by what is being claimed, and New Jersey is careful about whether it is counting working days or calendar days. Personal injury protection benefits are overdue if not paid within sixty days after the insurer is furnished written notice of the covered loss and its amount; the insurer avoids that only by writing within the sixty days to deny the claim or to claim a stated extension of up to forty-five days to investigate, and to give its reasons (§ 39:6A-5(g)). On the car itself, the Department’s physical damage rules give the insurer seven working days after notice of loss to inspect, commence negotiations and make a good-faith offer, and set a maximum payment period of thirty calendar days measured to the settlement cheque, the return of the repaired vehicle or its replacement — after which a written explanation of the delay is owed, and owed again every thirty calendar days (N.J.A.C. 11:3-10.3(a), 11:3-10.5). The general unfair-claims subchapter, N.J.A.C. 11:2-17, adds a further set of clocks for claims of other kinds. It is in force — the whole of N.J.A.C. 11:2 was readopted effective 30 May 2025 and now expires 30 May 2032, and no adoption notice between 2001 and 2026 touched the claim-handling rules — but its wording could not be read from a current publication for this entry, so its day counts are not stated here. On the court deadlines, injury to the person runs two years and damage to the vehicle six, and an action on the policy is the same six-year contract period, subject to whatever suit clause the policy itself contains.